Measuring Peace from the Bottom Up with the Pasto Indigenous Group in Nariño, Colombia

Abstract

In the early 1990s, a revolutionary movement emerged in the international development research community using collaborative methods and bottom-up approaches to not only create knowledge through qualitative inquiry but also to define criteria and indicators to quantitatively measure key concepts, program results, and impact (Holland 2013, 1). Proponents argued that collaborative methods often provide a more accurate and complete picture of the reality on the ground. In addition, including local people in the process of designing measurement tools allows their perceptions and priorities to be communicated to policy makers even in a quantitative format (Chambers 2010; Firchow 2018; Holland 2013). Thus, international development researchers have used quantitative collaborative methods to develop participatory statistics— sometimes called participatory numbers—to design, monitor, and assess the impact of projects, programs, and policies (Gaillard et al. 2016). This article explores the use of one collaborative methodology applicable to the field of political science, with particular emphasis on scaling it for use at higher levels of analysis. The Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI) methodology forms part of the participatory statistics toolbox. It was developed in 2012 by Pamina Firchow and Roger Mac Ginty as a result of dissatisfaction with traditional approaches to measuring peace-related phenomena. The EPI project pioneered a methodology to source indicators of peace at the community level using focus-group discussions and indicator-verification community meetings to develop quantitative data, or participatory statistics, using collaborative methods (Firchow 2018; Firchow and Mac Ginty 2017; 2020). By generating bottom-up indicators of peace-related concepts, the EPI project illustrated that localized perceptions of peace are not only articulated in different ways from top-down narratives and conceptualizations but also raise different issues. In contrast to top-down indicators that measure peace on a country level, the EPI methodology allows for an analysis of perceptions of peace in different villages and neighborhoods in conflict-affected contexts. Moreover, EPI indicators also can be used to collect longitudinal, individual-level quantitative data that can be used to track changes in perceptions of peace at the local level. Our research team has had tremendous success utilizing these locally sourced indicators to measure peace and related concepts in a wide variety of contexts. For example, our work in Afghanistan shed light on potential openings for women’srights issues in rural areas of Eastern Afghanistan (Firchow and Urwin 2020). Our research also has demonstrated how communities of reintegrated fighters in Colombia can contribute to transitional justice by bringing together human rights and peacebuilding initiatives (Dixon and Firchow 2020). In addition, international organizations including the US Institute for Peace, the US Agency for International Development, and the Inter-American Foundation are using EPI in practical applications to guide and evaluate their local-level programming in war-affected contexts such as Colombia and Sri Lanka. However, the very nature of EPI, which allows for such a detailed localized picture, prevents this methodology from illuminating the wider context. When researchers are focused on community-level peace, this is not problematic. Indeed, EPI’s context specificity is a demonstrated strength of this methodology. Yet, many research questions in political science entail regional or national comparisons and therefore require a higher level of analysis. In these circumstances, EPI’s strength becomes a limitation. Indeed, EPI is so context specific that we are careful to use indicators in the community only in which they were sourced. In this project, however, we seek to build on our prior successes by determining whether the EPI methodology can be scaled up such that a regional measure of peace might be built from bottom-up indicators (Duursma, Firchow, and Levy 2020). If successful, this project will render data gathered using bottom-up indicators more comparable to existing top-down indices and barometers and also will create bottom-upmeasures that can be compared across contexts and groups. This article describes a pilot project that uses this collaborative methodology in an effort to produce a bottom-up barometer of peace for the Pasto Indigenous group in Nariño and Putumayo, Colombia. We initiated this project as a collaboration with representatives from the Coordinación Nacional de Mujeres Indígenas de Colombia (CONAMIC), an indigenous women’s activist group in Colombia. At the same time as we were interested in exploring how our communityfocused methodology might be scaled up, members of